Wietse Zweitze Venema

Current life

I am a Google software engineer, based at the New York office,
currently working on Binary Authorization for Cloud.
After 18 years with IBM, including many of the best years in my
career, I decided that it was time for a change.

Many people know my name from the Postfix open source mail server,
and from the Coroner's
Toolkit, written with Dan Farmer, primarily for the post-mortem
analysis of computer break-ins. I wrote these at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research
Center, in the USA, where I worked until 2015.

Older widely-known software includes TCP Wrapper,
and SATAN
(written with Dan Farmer). I wrote these while I lived in the
Netherlands.

I completed my 2+ year term as chair of the FIRST, an international association
of computer security teams with over 150 members world-wide in
government, industry, and academia.

Previous life

In a previous life I studied physics at Groningen University
in the Netherlands, where I did my Ph.D. dissertation on
work done at the KVI.

I spent 12 years at Eindhoven University, the Netherlands, as
systems architect at the Mathematics
and Computing Science department. For 8 years, part of that
time was devoted to writing tools for automated translation of EDI
(Electronic Data Interchange) messages. The result of this effort
lives on under the flag of Descartes.

Private life

Weather permitting, Annita and I take weekly breaks for riding our
bicycles or for walking up and down one of the many hills in the region.